Better Not to Know
by Sarah1281
Summary: In the afterlife, Valjean manages to find the members of his family who are also dead. He's not always pleased with how their lives have turned out.


Better Not to Know

Sybil Thénardier had never expected to die in prison. That had seemed like something much more likely to happen to someone like Fantine who had broken all the rules and then had the nerve to lie about them and badly.

She had never thought she would go to prison at all, even after her husband had turned to crime. But they weren't really _big _crimes, just little ones where they pretended to be different people in need of money. The needing money bit had always been true. Perhaps it was naïve of her, she had seen what happened to criminals before, but they had turned to crime so slowly and been reasonably successful for so long that it had taken her quite by surprise when they had finally been caught.

Perhaps they had gotten too greedy. They had never involved the Patron Minette so directly before and they had never actually held a man hostage before. Sybil might have even minded if not for the fact that he was a clear fool and the matter of Cosette.

_Cosette_.

She would have expected the flames of that hatred to have died out long ago but somehow it never had. She could not put her feelings into words, exactly, but it _burned _to see that creature in anything but the most miserable of circumstances. Even back then, it had been hard to look at her and not smack her just for existing. Cosette had never known just how many times she had held herself back for fear of literally killing the girl and costing them their own servant she could trust her husband would not be seduced by.

And to see her as so fine a lady while her own daughters lived in such squalor! Éponine and Azelma were better than Cosette. They had always been better because they had been _born _better and out of a proper marriage, too. To have Cosette arrive with no recognition of them and the nerve to _pity _them! Sybil would not have cared one bit if Monsieur what's-his-name had refused to cooperate and Cosette had been made to pay for that.

But though she had not known who he was then, she certainly knew now. More to the point, he knew who she was.

She had nothing to say to him but apparently the feeling was not mutual.

Jean Valjean's not-quite-body (for how could it be a body? They were dead) was radiating wariness and pain and guilt. Good. He should feel guilty if he was going to do this.

"Why are you here?" she asked rudely.

"Sybbie…" Jean began, his voice breaking.

Sybil's lip curled in distaste. "Nobody has called me that in years."

"It's what I called you," Jean reminded her.

"I'm not ten years old anymore. I'm not even alive. It's Sybil if you must but I would prefer you to call me Madame Thénardier," Sybil said flatly. "Actually, I would prefer it if you called me nothing and left."

"Sybil, then," Jean said, completely ignoring what she had actually wanted.

"I have nothing to say to you."

"But I have things to say to you and I really must insist on saying them," Jean said firmly.

Sybil wondered if there was a chance she could just get him to go away. Probably not. He would either say what he came here to say after she gave up arguing and wasting time or he would come back later and waste time later on. She did not want to hear it but he didn't care what she wanted, did he? Best to just get it over with now and hope that once he said all he had come to say he would not come back.

Jean seemed to take her silence as an invitation to begin. "How did it come to this?"

"How did what come to what?" she asked coldly.

"You were such a sweet child," he said, his eyes unfocused. "You never once complained, even when we had to go without which we often did. Every time you borrowed that milk from the neighbor you just looked so sad and apologetic that I never had the heart to tell your mother even when I knew I really should since we could not afford it and she would have put a stop to such foolishness."

"That was a long time ago."

Jean sighed heavily. "It was. How could you have gone from that sweet and loving child into a woman who would torture another poor little girl and needlessly make her life in many ways worse than your own after your father died?"

That raised her hackles and it was all she could do not to hit him. Would he feel physical pain in the afterlife? "Needless? You think it was needless?"

"I think that when I first saw poor Cosette she had a black eye and was carrying a bucket larger than herself for miles in the dead of the night on Christmas with no proper clothing," Jean replied. "Tell me how that could possibly be necessary."

"It is hardly my fault that it was so difficult to get water back in Montreuil," Sybil snapped, uncertain of why she was bothering to defend herself to this man. It did not matter what he thought but she could not stand to listen to the trials and tribulations of 'poor Cosette'! "I could not help it if the man we paid to fetch water did not work that late or that a customer came and needed water for his horses. What were we to do? You cannot just not give a gentleman the water his horses need. We were having money troubles as it was without offending a paying customer and it was a reasonable request."

"You could have gone yourself," Jean told her.

"I? I had other work to do and Cosette was just lazing about," Sybil said dismissively.

"You could have clothed her properly. She was wearing rags," Jean said accusingly.

"We clothed her just fine," Sybil insisted. "We did not have a great deal of money. There were always debts to pay and once you and Fantine stopped paying we were worse-off than ever."

"Your daughters surely did not need as fine clothing as they had. You could have easily have given them serviceable clothing and managed to buy Cosette something serviceable as well," Jean suggested.

Sybil laughed harshly. "Oh, I see how it is! You will come and tell me how my husband and I should have managed our limited money. We should have literally taken the clothing from our dear daughters' backs in order to spoil _Cosette_."

"Not dressing someone in rags is hardly akin to spoiling them," Jean protested.

"You don't know the meaning of the word spoiled," Sybil accused. "You bought Cosette everything she ever wanted and gave her a dowry of 600,000 francs!"

Jean looked away. "I had no need for the money and why not give her what I could?"

"I could not give her anything if I had wanted to, not without depriving my own daughters, and I saw no reason to take away from them because of some bastard daughter of a whore!" Sybil exclaimed.

Jean's eyes flashed. "Don't call her that! Either of them."

"It is what it is and me not calling it that won't change it," Sybil said. "Her mother was a whore. She was never married. That makes Cosette the bastard child of a whore."

"She was only forced to turn to prostitution because her child's father abandoned her and my factory failed her and _your_ ludicrously overinflated debts crushed her so she had nowhere else to turn. She was only trying to protect her daughter. You led her to think Cosette was dying," Jean said, anger and guilt warring over his features.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize that it was only a bad thing to be a whore when they became one for no other reason than because they hated decency," Sybil said sarcastically.

Jean just shook his head. "You are thinking about this the wrong way. Do not think of it as every nice thing that Cosette has, or even adequate, is taking away from anybody else. Just look at your resources and divide it three ways."

"Which would require giving my own daughters less so that some brat abandoned to us would have nicer things," Sybil countered.

Jean's eyebrows rose to his forehead. "Abandoned? You know very well that Cosette was not abandoned. Her mother loved her dearly and gave all that she had and more to you for Cosette's sake and she appeared not to have received a sou of it!"

"All I know is that one day the money stopped coming and we still kept her. You could have asked anyone and heard all about how charitable we were," Sybil declared.

Jean grimaced. "I do not always hold with the majority opinion and the reason that the money did not come was because Fantine was dead. Your greed drove her to prostitution and being out working in the streets all night in the cold with only the kind of enticing clothing prostitutes wear – as if there is anything enticing about a poor frozen woman! – was what led to her being sick and ultimately killed her."

Sybil shrugged. "She made her choices. If she did not like what we charged, she was welcome to come collect her daughter."

"She hadn't the money for it!"

"Then she is lucky that we did not turn her out when she stopped paying," Sybil said.

" 'Lucky' is not the word I would use," Jean muttered. "You hate her so much. Why?"

"Why?" Sybil repeated. Her husband had occasionally asked her the same thing though of course he cared far less. She had always hated to be asked that. How could she explain? Such hatred, she felt, was in her bones. She thought sometimes that she had hated Cosette from the moment that she saw her, still in Fantine's arms. She had wanted to turn the pair of them away but Fantine had coin and was willing to pay whatever they asked for and they had debts to pay. Always so many debts to pay. And to think she had once thought that she had escaped the poverty of her youth.

Jean just continued to watch her, waiting for her reply.

"I just do."

Jean started to look frustrated. "That's not reason enough."

"It is!" Sybil insisted. "We were a perfectly happy family, just the four of us, and then Fantine dropped Cosette off and things were never quite right again. She was a hideous creature and just having her around made my skin crawl."

"She quickly became much more charming with me," Jean told her. "You cannot fairly blame her for what the upbringing you gave her did to her."

"What does it even matter?" she asked. "It was a long time ago."

Jean frowned. "That is true," he agreed reluctantly, "and normally I try to keep the past in the past but you _tortured_ my daughter for no reason that I can see and I-"

Sybil had had enough. "Cosette was _never _your daughter. She was the child of Fantine and some anonymous man and could never, ever be yours."

Jean drew back as though he had been slapped. "She is, though."

"I don't care how much you _loved _that brat or doted on her, you cannot just decide that people are family." She gave him an accusing glare. "You cannot just decide that they are not, either."

"Sybil-"

"Be honest," she demanded, "would you even be here right now if it weren't for your issues with how I treated your precious Cosette?"

He looked wounded. "Of course I would! Without that this would be so much easier and we could have spoken about that instead of what you did to my daughter."

Clearly he had his heart set on pretending that Cosette was his daughter even though it was far from the truth.

"Really?" she asked icily. "And just what would you have wanted to talk about if you can stop talking about _her _for five minutes?"

"What happened to you, Sybil?" Jean asked again. "How could you have become what you became?"

Sybil's laugh was a harsh and ugly thing. "What happened to me? Life, I suppose. When I finally died, rotting away in a miserable jail cell, it was almost a relief."

The anger had faded and the guilt that took its place was irksome.

"Oh, don't look at me like that! It was better than anyone would have thought after my uncle stupidly got himself arrested," Sybil snapped.

Jean closed his eyes. "I never meant-"

"I don't care," Sybil interrupted. "What you did or didn't mean doesn't change what happened."

"What did happen?" Jean asked her, clearly fearing the worst. "If you could bring yourself to tell me."

"Well Sarah died a week or so later," Sybil said bluntly. It was too many years ago and too far away for it to matter anymore. "No bread, you see. Mother took us to Paris. We couldn't stay in Faverolles after what you did. Gabriella got lost somehow on the way. She kept Theo with her, I think, but just left the rest of us behind. She had never been capable of taking care of so many of us even with your help and she had always done what she had to to survive. The six of us stood no chance but perhaps two of them did. One day she told us to wait right there and she'd be right back and she never came back. I might have known when she walked away with Theo. She didn't even look back."

Jean was breathing heavily now and looking like every word was cutting into him. He didn't show half of this pain when he had completely unnecessarily branded himself with a poker. "Sybil…"

"What? It was a long time ago."

"You have to believe me when I say that I never wanted any of that and I'm so sorry for everything you went through," Jean said, his eyes pleading.

Sybil considered. "I do believe you."

Jean dared to look hopeful. "Does this mean you forgive me?"

"No."

He jerked. "I…see."

"You can be as sorry as you like and it doesn't change that you left us to die as surely as my mother did," Sybil said coolly.

"It wasn't my choice to leave," Jean said quietly.

"It _was_ your choice to put your fist through that window and take off with a loaf of bread like an idiot," Sybil argued. "I remember hearing about it and wondering why, if you were going to try to steal something, you couldn't have had any sense about it!"

"I…I wasn't thinking," Jean said, not able to meet her eyes.

"It doesn't matter," Sybil said again. "It was a long time ago."

"What happened to you and the others?" Jean asked her. "After…after Jeanne left you?"

"We could have tried to stay together, I suppose," Sybil said indifferently. "We didn't. I certainly didn't. I was too desperate and vulnerable to worry about three younger siblings. Who knows what they might have done?"

"Did you never hear anything more from your family?" Jean asked, horrified.

"Did you?"

Jean's shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry."

"Useless words," Sybil said dismissively. "I grew up and I got married and things were finally going well. Then _Cosette_."

"How can you possibly blame Cosette for your debts?" Jean demanded. "I saw the condition you kept her in. She couldn't have used up much money at all and I do not even know how much money you wrung from first Fantine and then me."

"You left Cosette 600,000 francs but would begrudge me just a few hundred?" Sybil asked incredulously. "I know that you made _million_ when you were mayor."

Jean sighed and ran a hand across his face. "I tried to find you. I risked a great deal trying to find all of you and spent quite a bit of money. If I had known then I would have given you as much money as you wanted. What was the money to me?"

"So you _tried_," Sybil said, unimpressed. "You even _met me_ and you had no idea."

"You didn't know, either," Jean pointed out.

He did have a point there but she quickly rallied. "_You _were supposed to be dead. I saw the newspaper and everything."

Incomprehensively, a lighter look came into his eyes. "Ah, you could read, then?"

"Of course I can read," Sybil said, offended. "Why wouldn't I be able to read? I may have never been a _millionaire _but I'm no fool."

"I mean no offense," Jean apologized. "I just never could until I was, let's see, forty, I think."

"Did you know," Sybil said abruptly, suddenly burning with the desire to make sure that he _did _know, "you have two great-nieces? And three great-nephews, I suppose." Gavroche and…what had those other two been called? They were alive, at least, which is more than she could say for poor Éponine.

"Five?" Jean asked, his brow furrowed. "I remember…Éponine and Azelma, was it?"

"There were three boys, too, though two of them had not been born when you stole Cosette," Sybil explained.

An irritated look crossed Jean's face for a moment. "That again? I hardly stole her. I didn't even buy her. There was a debt and I paid that debt before leaving with Cosette with her mother's blessing in writing."

"Do you remember how well-cared for my girls were?" Sybil asked. "They had never known the kind of hunger that keeps you up at night or the terrible way that, the longer you go without eating, the less hungry you feel. They did not know what it was to have no shoes or no fire in the dead of winter. Even Cosette was fed and had shoes!"

"I do," Jean said in a slow, measured tone. He knew where she was going with this.

"Do you remember when you saw them again?" Sybil pressed, staring intently at him. "Do you remember how Azelma's hands were bleeding? Do you remember how they had no shoes and had to borrow their father's? Do you remember how they hadn't eaten in days? Do you remember the rags that they wore? Éponine used to tell me that she wished the river was cleaner so she could throw herself into it, you know."

Jean bowed his head. "I…I tried to help. You know I tried to help. If your husband hadn't had me _assaulted_ then I would have given you aid. I was only there to help in the first place. Maybe it would not have been what you felt you deserved but it would have been _something_."

"_Cosette_ got to live like a baroness," Sybil said accusingly. "My daughters, your great-nieces, lived in worse squalor than she _ever _did. My girls were pretty once. Cosette _is_ a baroness now!"

"Cosette being happy takes nothing away from your children," Jean said firmly.

"No?" Sybil could feel hysterical laughter bubbling up inside of her. "Do you know that the same Baron Marius Pontmercy that Cosette married is the same one that my Éponine loved? But why would any man want a girl stricken by poverty when he could have a coddled little rose? The fool didn't even realize what you were doing until her husband told her. You gave her everything and she's not even grateful."

"It's not her fault. She was never meant to know," Jean insisted, a fire igniting in his eyes. "She's so innocent and pure, despite her past, that how could she understand that her husband and I would lie? How could she even begin to imagine why we would need to?"

"Did you know," Sybil said conversationally, "that my Azelma is a rich woman now?"

Jean looked a little taken aback. "Oh?"

Sybil nodded. "Oh, yes. She and my husband have gone off to the New World, you see. The baron, who I don't think my husband even recognized as our old neighbor, gave him more than twenty thousand francs to leave and not tell anyone about you."

"That is…good," Jean said hesitantly.

"I don't know how well the slave trade will agree with Azelma. She always was so delicate," Sybil mused. "But it suits my husband perfectly and she will adjust."

Jean paled. "The…slave trade?"

"Yes. But Azelma was the surprise happy ending, especially when you consider the others," Sybil went on in that same light tone.

Jean looked like he was afraid to ask. "What happened to your other children?"

"I had two little boys who I suppose you could say I sold," Sybil mused. "Oh, not as slaves! We are more civilized than that. I knew a woman who had two dead little boys the same age as my sons and a wealthy father to wring support from. What was I to do? But they were lost in the shuffle when her household was arrested and they were playing outside and so now they live on the street. You know how these things happen. I was in jail at the time."

It was really remarkable for, as much as he clearly resented how she had behaved with Cosette, it was so easy to pull such guilt out of him.

"I never meant for you to be arrested," Jean told her. "I didn't call the police."

"Of course you wouldn't," Sybil said agreeably. "You were a supposedly dead fugitive, after all. I do think that my husband is better at being a fugitive than you. He escaped prison his first try after less than a year and he was never recaught. And I can assure you that he feels no guilt whatsoever because the jails say he was a bad person."

"Perhaps…he should feel a _little _guilt about some things," Jean said delicately. "Guilt is not always a bad thing. It can let you know that your life is going the wrong way."

"And it can also lead to withering away and dying of despair because you think you're too awful to inflict yourself on other people," Sybil said pointedly.

"It was for the best," Jean said stubbornly. "I had a good death and Cosette and Marius are now free from the shadow of my past."

"Meanwhile, my husband is enjoying himself with his new wealth in America," she told him. "But you can go ahead and keep thinking you made the right choice since you can't change it now."

"What happened to your other children?" he asked, determinedly ignoring her.

"Gavroche and Éponine both died at the barricades," Sybil said bluntly, enjoying the way he flinched. "They both died at _your _barricade. In fact, Gavroche was the one to deliver that letter to you."

Jean's eyes became haunted. "That boy…I _told _him to stay away from the barricades."

"Some children just don't listen," Sybil said indifferently. "But Éponine! She didn't care about the barricade or a republic or anything like that. She just read too many romance novels and didn't understand that life _couldn't _work like that but that didn't mean it wasn't worth living. She wanted to die with that Marius and you denied her even that."

"I cannot apologize for saving a young man's life."

"No, of course not," Sybil scoffed. "Nothing's too good for little Cosette, even if once again what she has is literally taken from Éponine."

"Marius is a free person and he had somehow formed a mutual attachment to my daughter whatever your daughter's feelings might have been so me saving him was not depriving Éponine of anything. If she really loved him she should have wanted him to live," Jean said.

Sybil shrugged. "Perhaps she did after all. She did take a bullet for him."

Jean's eyes were too sad just then for her to feel comfortable meeting and so she didn't.

"So much tragedy, so much misery…I had hoped for better. I cannot help but wonder how things would have happened if I had not been arrested. Would things have been better?" Jean wondered.

Sybil snorted. "It's hard to see how they could have been worse."

"For you, yes, but I did a lot of good with my life after meeting the bishop," Jean explained. "I ended up in a position to do so much good that I cannot imagine I would have had a chance to do if I had not been in Toulon, as strange as that may seem. Would I have been able to save you all had I not been arrested? There was no work and no bread and we were being slowly crushed as it was. Maybe there would have been a miracle. Who can say? But then what would have become of poor Cosette?"

Of course.

"Offered a chance to save your family and you _still _choose that brat," she said bitterly. "Ask me again why I hate her."

"No one can change the past so it does not matter," Jean said firmly. "And it would not be her fault anyway. None of this was ever her fault. She is my family."

"You can't choose your family," Sybil insisted.

Slowly, Jean shook his head. "You are wrong, I'm afraid."

Sybil stared at him for a long moment before she nodded. "Yes. Perhaps you can."

Jean frowned, hurt, but Sybil just continued to watch him impassively.

At last, he made an aborted gesture to touch her arm. "I'm sorry. I really wish that I could have been better for you and your siblings and your mother."

With that he turned and walked away.

Sybil didn't watch him go and she most certainly did not wonder if he would ever be back.

Instead, she went looking for Éponine: her _real _family.


End file.
